Lowell Nesbitt

Lowell Nesbitt was credited as the first artist to produce a series of x-ray-inspired paintings, a body of work that began in 1963. During this time frame he also produced a series of electronic interior paintings and drawings based on the early IBM ENIAC and Univac computers. Beginning in the 1960s he had a long-standing relationship with New York's esteemed Howard Wise Gallery, a space devoted to art and new technology -- a radical departure from the focus of other Manhattan galleries during this period. It was also during the 1960s he began experimenting with printmaking, and during his lifetime produced more than 100 original prints primarily in the medium of dry point engraving.

Lowell Nesbitt was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1933. He graduated from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, and the Royal College of Art in London, where he majored in stained glass & etching.

His first solo museum exhibition was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1964. In the mid 1970s, after a second solo show at the Corcoran, he bequeathed more than one million dollars to the museum, but in 1989, the gift was rescinded as a protest to the museum's cancellation of a controversial photography exhibition by Robert Mapplethorpe, Nesbitt's long time friend. The Phillips Collection was then named the beneficiary of Nesbitt's cash endowment.

During his career he had more than 130 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. In 1980, the United States Postal Service issued four stamps based on Mr. Nesbitt's floral paintings. He also served as the official artist for the space flights of Apollo 9 and Apollo 13.

His paintings, drawings, and prints are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the Corcoran Gallery and the National Gallery of Fine Art in Washington, D.C., the Detroit Institute of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the La Jolla Museum in California, among others.

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